As I already mentioend in a previous post, I installed Windows XP using Boot Camp last night, and it works phenomenally well. This evening, I used the beta of Parallels Virtual Workstation for Mac OS X on the iMac, setting up Windows XP there as well. Runs very nicely in a window alongside Mac OS X. Really eats up the CPU, but it works well.

The UI has serious issues. Between being pre-release quality and pretty obviously being designed by someone without much Mac UI experience, it’s an interesting experience. There are also some features that just don’t work yet.

However, the Windows virtual machine runs at a very good clip and is vastly superior, performance-wise, to Virtual PC running on anything I ever saw it running on, which is very cool.

Kinda wish these had come out before I installed my one copy of Windows XP Pro on the real PC sitting next to me — I’d have junked the PC and just installed XP on the Mac. Unfortunately, Microsoft won’t let me reuse the activation key — even if right now I were to nuke Windows off the real PC.